NESS ZIONA, Israel, Dec. 19, 2017 /PRNewswire/ — BiomX Ltd., a microbiome company developing customized phage therapies, today announced the acquisition of RondinX. The acquisition fortifies BiomX’s bacterial target discovery capabilities and supports its product development pipeline. In addition, through the acquisition, BiomX will expand its therapeutic pipeline with novel microbial targets for a chronic liver disease. Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

In parallel, San Francisco-based 8VC, an angel investor in RondinX, made an undisclosed equity investment in BiomX. Earlier this year, BiomX announced the completion of a $24 million series A financing.

“RondinX developed a superior computational platform that provides an accurate picture of the residing bacterial strains present in the microbiome samples of large cohorts of patients as well as their growth dynamics,” stated Jonathan Solomon, CEO of BiomX, “This merger of capabilities brings BiomX’s target discovery capabilities to the forefront of microbiome analysis, and at the same time supports the development of our lead inflammatory bowel disease and cancer products. I wish to also welcome 8VC, the latest addition to our impressive list of investors,” he added.

The RondinX technology is based on the pioneering research established at the Weizmann Institute of Science and exclusively licensed to RondinX from its commercial arm YEDA Research and Development Company Ltd. In the research, Profs. Eran Segal and Eran Elinav demonstrated the link between certain members of the microbiome community and specific disease states by incorporating prediction of bacterial growth dynamics into microbiome analysis. The findings were published in Science in 2015.

About BiomX

BiomX is a microbiome drug discovery company developing customized phage therapies that target and destroy harmful bacteria in chronic diseases such as inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) and cancer. We discover and validate proprietary bacterial targets and customize our natural and engineered phage compositions against these targets.

The Company’s platforms use computational and synthetic biology and cutting-edge research from Profs. Rotem Sorek, Ph.D., and Eran Elinav, M.D., Ph.D., of The Weizmann Institute of Science; and Professor Timothy K. Lu, M.D., Ph.D., of The Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Investors in the Company include OrbiMed Israel Incubator LP, Johnson & Johnson Development Corporation Inc., Takeda Ventures, Inc., Seventure Partners Health for Life Capital fund, Mirae Asset Global Investments, and SBI.